Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazinebrings together a conversation that has lit a rhetorical fire under editors, writers and readers.

The book in its entirety is a sudden inspiration to the masses of young editors who want to start their own magazine, regardless of the obstacles they may have to overcome. Highlighting the importance of the reading masses, Kurowski reminds us that though readership may determine the life-span of a given magazine, it is the writers who ultimately control it. This is enough to fill any aspiring or veteran editor with hope.

Paper Dreams is a rich, collective history of an evolving medium featuring essays and interviews by and with literary icons (Pierre Bayle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound) and influential contemporaries (Frederick Barthelme, T.C. Boyle, Roxane Gay, Herbert Leibowitz, Rick Moody, Speer Morgan, Jay Neugeboren, Jim Shepard, Laura van den Berg, and dozens of others), all of which illustrates the significance of what has become a longstanding creative pillar and cultural linchpin of American society.

The literary magazine has endured a century of change but it has always endured. Paper Dreams is a comprehensive, must-have resource for everyone in the writing community-from publishers, editors and writers to educators, book stores and librarians, Paper Dreams is a living testament to the resilience of the literary magazine and the people who make them possible.

It’s The American Dream in a nutshell.

Beyond description of how important this piece of literary history truly is, every editor, writer and reader should have a copy for his/her own personal library and one to carry around for the day you come across a young, aspiring editor/writer on the brink of giving up on contributing to the resurrection of the literary magazine.

This novel-in-stories follows a diverse group of passengers on a train from Baltimore to Chicago, revealing the secrets of their past, their hopes for the future and just how intertwined their lives really are.

Journey by train from Baltimore to Chicago via the perspectives of a diverse group of passengers. They are the strangers we meet every day: a soldier slowly losing his faith, a businesswoman learning to juggle her job and family, a computer geek-turned-criminal, couples in love, a Holocaust survivor, a poet hunting for inspiration and a hit man with a job to finish before the train grinds to a halt. Watch as these and other characters’ lives and stories seamlessly intersect, quietly shaping one another along the way.

Mr. Goodman is a gifted storyteller who weaves his tales of each individual character to create a finely patterned cloth. Tracks develops in a way that has the secondary characters of one story become the central characters of another. As you move through the stories you have opportunity to see each of the characters from many perspectives, understanding their “now,” past and future.

The scenes in the stories of Tracks expands to include all kinds of raw human emotion, reminding us along the way that every person, no matter how seemingly insignificant has a story to tell.

Once you’ve read this book, expect to catch yourself daydreaming as you imagine the personal lives of the strangers around you that you never paid much attention to before.